Smog

Let us begin with a language exercise.

Let us divert the term smog from its usual atmospheric connotation, the result of pollution produced by carbon dioxide-emitting devices and representative of a certain idea of modern. Let us, therefore, use the term not in its literal sense, but as a metaphorical reference to a kind of portal—a boundary set between a sterile exterior and a lived interior. Between the emptiness of an architectural erudition that, in the absence of people, occupies the public space, and the fullness of the domus, the domestic—that conquered, secure, and lived-in space which, ultimately, reverberates the tastes and capacities of all those who inhabit it.

There exists a visible opposition that arises from another, hidden one: the gaze of a filmmaker upon a society that is not his own. A society constructing its present without roots — roots that were exterminated or confined, in colonial fashion, to reserves configured as externalities — and which, as such, asserts itself through faith in a future already attempting, even then, to take form in the present.

A society, therefore, without history.

The gaze of a filmmaker, perhaps, fascinated by that almost sci-fi space laid before his eyes: clean, aseptic, and devoid of humans. A filmmaker coming from a country built upon the solid structures of a millennial-long relationship with history. And, at the time, was attempting to rise from the vast ruins into which the country and the continent had fallen. Let us remember that in 1962, only seventeen years had passed since the end of the Second World War. Italy and Europe were still closing the wounds of that conflict.

A country, a continent, and a society, therefore, with history.

At a certain point in the film, the main character questions the absence of people, and the answer is paradigmatic: they are either in their cars or at home. This is the cue that allows the filmmaker’s gaze to abandon the exterior and venture into the interiors of the homes of the rich—both the newly rich and the old rich, American and, above all, non-American. Everything changes: the houses are filled with people eager for the culture of the country’s language of self, yet, above all, the historical time of what those beautiful shots reveal also changes. And it changes in the opposite direction: here it is not the future materialising in the present. Here it is the past attempting to give structure to a present uprooted from history. Houses with neoclassical interiors, pianos decorated with baroque ornamentation, and an ambience borrowed from the European upper classes of the past—the interior of contemporary homes. There are some emblematic examples, such as the Stahl House, which stand empty. And yet, everything is a simulacrum of that reality, like the decoration of a piano. A social kitsch added to aesthetic kitsch. After all, all the classical splendour of those parties comes from oil. After all, this is not a nobility rooted in structures of power, but rather self-made men building luxury homes beside oil wells.

The oil that provides them with the money for their false lives and, at the same time, poisons, through the formation of smog, the entire atmosphere of Los Angeles. The film ends with a reference to a famous house: the Triponent House, in Beachwood Canyon. There, once again, in a temporal leap, the filmmaker shows us the exterior of the portal—but only, this time, seen from within: in that interior, the film’s main character finds himself once more alone, enclosed in a kind of transparent prison. Transparent, as he is told, because the height of the building allows one to see beyond the smog.

Sixty years on, where is the glamour of LA’s modernist architecture, now occupied by postmodern pastiche? The smog, surely, remains, and even thicker. Beneath it lies all that we did not see but felt latent in the film: poverty, racism, and riots bringing to the surface the occupation of public space by what inherently belongs to it: politics, culture, society, art, and so on.

To conclude, two curious notes: the insertion of a strange figure into a strange environment—an Italian painter trying to make his mark in a country not his own, using a style that is not his own, Abstract Expressionism. And yet, what would Abstract Expressionism have been without the European artists who fled the war to settle in the United States?

The second note concerns a fleeting, perhaps even unremarkable, line of dialogue in the film, yet one that contains a word which, in this time of genocide, explains much of what is now happening in historical terms: one of the characters refers to a “holy land”, to his holy land, as “Palestine”... Since the film dates from 1962, this is a statement made five years before the illegal occupation of 1967. It is an important reference at a moment when that territory is under pressure and at risk of disappearing beneath the power of the occupying force—and the world’s complicit silence.